January 20, 2022 - 6:00 pm CET

Virtual Meetup – Florian Bock

Abstract

The development of modern driving assistance systems is a key factor within the overall vehicle development, but as well a very complex task. An essential part of the applied processes is the topic of the safety of the function, i.e. the methods applied to ensure its reliability. For simple functions with very limited sensor and actor data input/output such as PDC (Park Distance Control) or ABS (Anti Braking System), the number of required test cases to “prove” the reliability was manageable and reasonable. Driving functions that fully take over the driving task for an extensive period of time face an uncountable number of possible situations that they have to deal with. In this case it is no longer enough to test based on simple sensor data and inputs/outputs. Instead, an abstract artefact is required to describe the surroundings of the vehicle – a traffic scenario.

These scenarios are then used throughout the whole development process – in the specification, the implementation and in testing. Whereas concrete test scenarios can be formulated in common formats such as OpenSCENARIO, natural language scenarios used, e.g., in the function specification, for legal purposes or for test driver instructions, are not standardized at all yet. They are manually created as text artefacts and therefore lack a common grammar, automatic translation and a congruent visualization. Therefore, the domain specific language and the corresponding tool stiEF were created, which will be presented in this talk. stiEF supports natural language scenario descriptions with different translations, an automatically generated scenario visualization and the possibility to export the underlying scenario data into different target formats for further utilization. Also, some insights are given in the difficulties with trying to encapsulate natural language descriptions into a formalized domain specific language.

Biography

Dr. Florian Bock studied Computer Science with focus on Software Engineering for Embedded Systems at the University of Applied Sciences in Ingolstadt. He received his Diploma (FH) in 2011 and Master of Science in 2014. Afterwards, he gained his Ph.D. in 2020 at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg with his thesis about domain specific languages for specification purposes. He has been working for more than 10 years within the Volkswagen Group and is currently focusing on scenario creation, management and usage. One essential part of that is the development and maintenance of the scenario creation language and tool stiEF.

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